Waiting, relationships and money in a Ponzi scheme in Northern Ghana

IF 1.3 Q2 ANTHROPOLOGY Critical African Studies Pub Date : 2020-01-02 DOI:10.1080/21681392.2019.1697315
J. Beek
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引用次数: 2

Abstract

In Northern Ghana, the microfinance company DKM convinced large segments of the population to give them money based on spectacular rates, only to fail spectacularly and leave many people bankrupt in 2016. Such Ponzi schemes are anything but unusual, in Africa and elsewhere, and have been studied as manifestations of an ever-accelerating neoliberal capitalism. Yet, the affected people remember DKM and its manager fondly, and they have abandoned the wait to get their money back. Instead of exploring economic questions, this paper will explore practices of waiting in the context of the scheme to understand the connection between social relationships and imagined futures. In DKM, actors engaged in deeply social forms of waiting, and these were part of late-modern financial schemes, leading to various forms of synchronization. When the tension between the social and instrumental aspects of this waiting emerged after the scheme’s collapse, actors – in Northern Ghana at least – ultimately decided to preserve their relationships. Looking back, actors speak about this period as a time of hope, a time in which waiting seemed to be over in a more existential sense.
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加纳北部庞氏骗局中的等待、关系和金钱
在加纳北部,小额信贷公司DKM说服了大量人口以惊人的利率向他们提供资金,结果却以惊人的失败告终,导致许多人在2016年破产。这样的庞氏骗局在非洲和其他地方并不罕见,并被研究为不断加速的新自由主义资本主义的表现。然而,受影响的人们对DKM及其经理记忆犹新,他们放弃了等待拿回他们的钱。本文将不探讨经济问题,而是探讨在该方案背景下的等待实践,以理解社会关系与想象的未来之间的联系。在DKM中,演员参与了深度社会形式的等待,这是近代金融计划的一部分,导致了各种形式的同步。当该计划失败后,社会方面和工具方面的紧张关系出现时,参与者——至少在加纳北部——最终决定维持他们的关系。回顾过去,演员们把这段时期说成是一个充满希望的时期,在这个时期,等待似乎在一种更存在的意义上结束了。
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来源期刊
Critical African Studies
Critical African Studies Arts and Humanities-Arts and Humanities (all)
CiteScore
3.00
自引率
0.00%
发文量
19
期刊介绍: Critical African Studies seeks to return Africanist scholarship to the heart of theoretical innovation within each of its constituent disciplines, including Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, History, Law and Economics. We offer authors a more flexible publishing platform than other journals, allowing them greater space to develop empirical discussions alongside theoretical and conceptual engagements. We aim to publish scholarly articles that offer both innovative empirical contributions, grounded in original fieldwork, and also innovative theoretical engagements. This speaks to our broader intention to promote the deployment of thorough empirical work for the purposes of sophisticated theoretical innovation. We invite contributions that meet the aims of the journal, including special issue proposals that offer fresh empirical and theoretical insights into African Studies debates.
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